Upsetting the Balance (72 page)

But instead, they were pulling back Mutt turned to Muldoon. “You’re right. They must be crazy. It’s the only thing that makes any sense a-tall.” Solemnly, Muldoon nodded.

Heinrich Jäger slammed his fist down on the cupola as his Panther rumbled out of Öels, heading west toward Breslau. He was wearing gloves. Otherwise his skin would have peeled off when it hit the frozen metal of the panzer. He wasn’t crazy—no, not he. About his superiors, he had considerable doubts.

So did Gunther Grillparzer. The gunner said, “Sir, what the devil’s the point of pulling out of Öels now, after we’ve spent the last three days fighting over it as if it were Breslau itself?”

“If I knew, I would tell you,” Jäger answered. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, either.” Not only had the
Wehrmacht
done a good job of fortifying Öels as part of the outer ring of Breslau’s defensive system, the fourteenth-century castle up on the hill made a first-class artillery observation post. And now they were abandoning the town, the castle (or what was left of it), and the works the engineers had made, just letting the Lizards take them while the panzers pulled back closer to Breslau.

Artillery shells whistled overhead, plowing up the frozen ground between the retreating panzers and Öels, as if to tell the Lizards,
thus far and no farther.
Jäger wondered if the Lizards would listen. They were hitting hard in this latest onslaught, probably fighting better than they had since the days when they first came to Earth and swept everything before them.

His Panther had two narrow rings and one wide one painted on the cannon, just behind the muzzle brake: two armored personnel carriers and one panzer. The Lizards were still tactically sloppy; they didn’t watch their flanks as well as they should, and they walked into ambushes even Russians would have seen. Half the time, though, they fought their way out of the ambushes, too, not because they were great soldiers but because their panzers and rockets broke the trap from the inside out. As always, they’d inflicted far more damage than they suffered.

Even now, Lizard artillery shells fell around the panzers as they withdrew. Jäger feared them almost as much as he feared the Lizards’ panzers. They spat little mines all over the bloody place; if your panzer ran over one of those, it would blow a track right off, and maybe send you up in flames. Sure enough, his Panther passed two disabled Panzer IVs, their crews glumly trudging west on foot

He gnawed on his lower lip. Öels was only about fifteen kilometers east of Breslau. The Lizards were already shelling the city that sprawled across the Oder. If they established artillery in Öels, they could pound Breslau to pieces, scattering about so many of their little mines that no one would dare walk the streets, let alone drive armored vehicles through them.

And yet, he’d been ordered to give up a position he could have held for a long time—ordered in terms so peremptory that he knew protest would have been useless. Stand-fast orders were what he’d come to expect, even when standing fast cost more lives than retreating would have. Now, when standing fast made sense, he had to give ground. If that wasn’t insanity, what was it?

His discontent deepened when his panzer finally reached its new assigned position. The village just outside of Breslau that was the linchpin of the new German line might have held fifty people before the war. It was on flat ground and, as far as he could see, had no special reason for existing. Some rolls of barbed wire strung across the landscape and a few trenches for infantrymen didn’t constitute a line of defense as far as he was concerned, no matter how imposing the wire and trenches might seem on a map in a warm room out of the range of the guns.

His driver thought the same thing. “Sir, they made us pull back to
this
?” he said in incredulous dismay.

“Johannes, believe you me, I wouldn’t have given you the order on my own,” Jäger answered.

Somebody had at least some small sense of how to defend a position. A soldier in a white parka over black panzer coveralls directed the Panther to a barn with a doorway that pointed east: a good firing position if the Lizards broke out of Öels and stormed toward Breslau. A couple of hundred meters farther west lay a stone farmhouse behind which he could retreat after firing, and which would do for a second position. But if the Lizards broke out of Öels, nothing here, at least, was going to stop them from breaking into Breslau.

To give the artillery its due, it was trying to make sure the Lizards didn’t break out of Öels. Just west of the town, the ground jerked and quivered and shook like a live thing. Every gun the Germans had around Breslau must have been pounding that stretch of terrain. Jäger hadn’t seen such a bombardment since his days in the trenches in World War I.

He didn’t see any shells falling
in
Öels, though. The
Wehrmacht
had conceded the town to the Lizards, and for the life of him he didn’t understand why. They could consolidate there at their leisure for the next big push. They were taking advantage of everything the Germans gave them, too. Through field glasses, he watched panzers and lorries coming into Öels and gathering east of the town.

“What the hell’s going on?” Gunther Grillparzer demanded, out and out anger in his voice. “Why aren’t we throwing gas into Öels? The wind’s blowing in the right direction—straight out of the west. We’ve got a wonderful target there, and we’re ignoring it I’ve seen the high mucky-mucks do some really stupid things, but this takes the cake.”

Jäger should have pounced on that open profession of heresy, but he didn’t. He couldn’t He felt the same way himself. He peered through the field glasses for another thirty seconds or so, then lowered them with a grunt of disgust. He’d risked his neck to throw nerve gas at the gas-mask factory in Albi. Why the devil wasn’t the artillery heaving it toward the Lizards now?

“Tear me off a chunk of that bread, will you, Gunther?” he said. When the gunner handed him a piece of the brown loaf, he dug out a tinfoil tube of meat paste and squeezed a blob onto the bread. Just because your commanders belonged in an institution for the feebleminded was no reason to starve. Die, yes; starve, no.

He was looking down at the bread and meat when the gloomy interior of the barn suddenly filled with a light as bright as—brighter than—day.

Johannes, the driver, let out a cry in his earphones: “My eyes!”

Jäger looked up, just for an instant, then lowered his gaze once more. Like the sun, the fireball in what had been Öels was too brilliant to look at. The light that filled the barn went from white to yellow to orange to red, slowly fading as it did so. When Jäger looked up again, he saw a great fiery pillar ascending toward the heavens, coloring the clouds red as blood.

The ground shook under the treads of the Panther. A wind tore briefly at the barn doors, then subsided. Stuck inside the turret, Grillparzer demanded, “What the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know,” Jäger said, and then, a moment later, “My God!” He knew what an explosive-metal bomb had done to Berlin; he’d heard about what had happened to Washington and Tokyo and south of Moscow. But knowing what such a bomb could do and seeing the bomb do it—the difference between those two was like the difference between reading a love poem and losing your virginity.

“They really did it,” he breathed in amazement.

“Who really did what, sir?” the panzer gunner asked indignantly.

“The physicists at—oh, never mind where, Gunther,” Jäger answered; even in the midst of such awe as he’d not felt in church for years, he did not forget his worship of the great god Security. “The point is, we’ve just given the Lizards what they gave Berlin.”

The panzer crew shouted like men possessed. Jäger joined the exultation, but more quietly. That sense of awe still filled him. Some of the explosive metal was what he’d snatched, Prometheus-like, from the Lizards. It was seldom given to a colonel of panzers to feel he’d personally turned the course of history. Jäger had that feeling now. In an odd way, it seemed larger than he was.

He shook himself, bringing the real world back into focus. “Johannes, how are your eyes?” he asked over the intercom.

“I’ll be all right, sir, I think,” the driver answered. “It was like the world’s biggest flashbulb went off a centimeter in front of my nose. I still see a big ring of smeary color; but it’s getting smaller and dimmer.”

“That’s good,” Jäger said. “Think of it like this: for the Lizards over there in Öels, it’s as if the sun went off a centimeter in front of their snouts—and they’ll never see anything again.”

More cheers rang out Gunther Grillparzer said, “You know what, sir? I have to apologize to the mucky-mucks. Never thought I’d live to see the day.”

“I tell you what, Corporal,” Jäger said: “I won’t tell them. That way they won’t die of shock.” The gunner laughed loud and long. Jäger added, “I thought they’d gone round the bend myself, and I’m not ashamed to say so. But it makes sense now: they let the Lizards concentrate in Öels, didn’t shell the town itself, both to hold the Lizards there and to make sure the bomb didn’t get hit by accident, and then—”

“Yes, sir,” Grillparzer agreed enthusiastically. “And then!”

In color and shape, the cloud rising from the explosive-metal bomb put Jäger in mind of Caesar’s amanita. It was more nearly the hue of apricot flesh than the rich, bright orange of the mushroom prized for its flavor since Roman days, but that was a detail. He wondered how many kilometers into the sky the cap of the mushroom rose.

“Well,” he said, half to himself, “I think Breslau has held.”

Gunther Grillparzer heard him.
“Jawohl!”
the gunner said.

An alarm hissed insistently. Atvar thrashed and twisted in free fall, fighting to stay asleep. Before long, he knew the fight was lost. As consciousness returned, fear came with it. You didn’t wake the fleetlord to report good news.

One of his eye turrets swiveled toward the communications screen. Sure enough, Pshing’s face stared out of it. The adjutant’s mouth worked, but no sound emerged. He looked extraordinarily ugly that way, or perhaps Atvar was grumpy at being roused so suddenly.

“Activate two-way voice,” he told the computer in his rest chamber, and then addressed Pshing: “Here I am. What’s the commotion?”

“Exalted Fleetlord!” Pshing cried. “The Big Uglies—the Deutsch Big Uglies—set off a fission bomb as we were about to overrun their fortified position at the town called Breslau. We had been concentrating males and equipment in the forward area for the assault on their works immediately outside the city, and suffered large losses in the blast.”

Atvar bared his teeth in a grimace of anguish a Tosevite who knew a little about the Race might have taken for laughter. His plan for the attack on Deutschland had allowed for the Deutsch Big Uglies’ having better weapons than the Race knew them to possess, but had not anticipated their having atomic bombs.

Tensely, he asked, “Is this a case like that of the SSSR, where they’ve shaped a device from plutonium they stole from us?”

“Exalted Fleetlord, results of analysis are at present both preliminary and ambiguous,” Pshing answered. “First approximation is that some of the fissile material was indeed taken from us, but that some may well have been independently produced.”

Atvar grimaced again, if that report was accurate, it was what he’d dreaded most. The SSSR had used the one bomb, apparently of plutonium stolen from the Race, but had shown no signs of being able to produce its own. That was bad, but could be lived with. If the Deutsche knew not only how to exploit radioactives that fell into their hands but also how to produce those radioactives, the war against the Big Uglies had just taken a new and altogether revolting turn.

“What are your orders, Exalted Fleetlord?” Pshing asked. “Shall we bomb the Deutsch positions in Breslau, and avenge ourselves in that fashion?”

“Do you mean with our own nuclear weapons?” Atvar said. When his adjutant made the affirmative gesture, he went on, “No. What would be the point of that? It would only create more nuclear zones for our males to cross, and the fallout, given Tosev 3 weather patterns, would adversely affect forces farther east. Unfortunately, we have not succeeded in tracking down the area where the Deutsche are conducting their nuclear experiments.”

“That is not surprising,” Pshing answered. “They so contaminated a stretch of their own territory when a pile went out of control that the radioactivity in the area could mask a successful experiment on their part”

“Truth,” Atvar said bitterly. “Even their incompetence may work in their favor. And, after the lesson we taught the Nipponese, they must know we respond severely to nuclear development efforts on the part of Big Uglies. They will be shielding their program as well as they can.”

“Surely you will not leave them unpunished merely because we cannot locate their nuclear reactors,” Pshing exclaimed.

“Oh, by no means,” Atvar said. If he did nothing, the revolt Straha had led against him would be merely a small annoyance, when compared to what the shiplords and officers would do to him now. Unless he wanted Kirel holding his position, he had to respond. “Have the targeting specialist select a Deutsch city within the zone of radioactive contamination. We shall remind the Big Uglies we are not to be trifled with. Report the targeting choice to me as soon as it is made—and it had best be made soon.”

“It shall be done.” Pshing’s face vanished from the screen.

Atvar tried to go back to sleep. That would have been the perfect way to show this latest setback did not unduly concern him. The setback
did
concern him, though, and sleep proved as elusive as victory over the Big Uglies.
So much for enhancing my reputation among the males,
he thought. He laughed in self-mockery. By the time this war was done, if it ever was, he’d be lucky to have any reputation left.

The communicator screen lit up again. “The largest Deutsch city within the contaminated zone is the one called München, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing reported. A map showed Atvar where in Deutschland München lay. “It is also a major manufacturing center and transport hub.”